José
Martí: Cuban Nationalist, Critic of American Imperialism

LIBERALISM,
ROMANTICISM, AND NATIONALISM

In the mid-19th
century it was still possible for a public figure to be a liberal, a Romantic,
and a nationalist, simultaneously. Giuseppe Mazzini, for one, comes to mind.
By the end of the century, such a combination was increasingly rare, at least
in Europe. There, nationalism – whatever its early associations with liberalism
and the French Revolution – was now the cause of the Right. Conservative elements
in and out of government fielded nationalism as a slogan having greater potential
mass appeal than mere defense of monarchy, feudal landholding, and established
churches.

In
so doing, the Right abandoned "conservatism" in the European sense
and wedded itself to a cause which contributed to some subsequent situations
and problems. Napoleon III, whose comic-opera regime gave Karl Marx so much
good material, was a pioneer in bringing together themes from Right and Left
to win mass support while pursuing a rather unspecified national "glory."
The Lesser Napoleon combined nationalist rhetoric, welfare programs, strong
executive government ("Caesarism"), frequent plebiscites, and interference
in markets overseen by his ideological mentors, the Positivists, who had all
gone into banking and engineering and did quite well under the Second Empire.
The Suez Canal, built by France and then not-too-subtly alienated by Britain,
was an outstanding Positivist engineering project and suggested, at least,
a partial withdrawal from social engineering into plain engineering. Whether
we may call Napoleon III a "proto-fascist" is perhaps a matter of
taste.

The real revolutionary
in terms of wedding a great territorial state to the formerly left-wing doctrine
of nationalism was, of course, Bismarck. In 1879, the Iron Chancellor abandoned
his liberal, free-trading supporters and forged new alliances with mercantilist
Sonderinteressen (special interests) in industry and agriculture and
founded the welfare state to draw support away from socialist parties. Thereafter,
German politics became a fight between various programs of national-socialism
and plain old socialism, as F.A. Hayek pointed out in The
Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1944 [pp. 167-180]).

In France, the
program of Charles Maurras and the Action Française – the eternal French
Nation ruled by a legitimate King, Catholicism with the sentimental bits (that
is, Christianity) taken out, and whatever else came to mind – helped re-define
the political spectrum. The terms "Left" and "Right" –
rather useless, anyway – never fully recovered from all these shifts. Romanticism,
too, became the property of the new "right-wing" nationalists. As
I pointed out last week, this emerging European synthesis left little work
for those who took the final steps into "national socialism" and
"social imperialism."

THE ATLANTIC
‘THEORY BARRIER’

The good news,
I suppose, is that what I call the Atlantic theory barrier still held. The broad
differences between life and politics in the New and Old Worlds tended to slow
down the transmission of new European social theories to North America. Since
most of these new ideas were pretty awful, this was all to the good. Only in
the 1880s did German-trained American scholars bring word of the great advances
being made under Bismarck’s "social monarchism" and it took a while,
after that, for us to be blessed with similar institutions. Around the same
time, European immigrants brought us that other great discovery, Marxism, further
increasing our potential happiness.

This chronology
is only approximate, and I would be the first to admit that Francis Lieber
had already brought a working knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy to Abraham Lincoln’s
War Department, where, I am sure, it was extremely useful. George Bancroft
was already applying Hegel’s system to the writing of American history, finding
out, rather shockingly, that American "democracy"  and not
the Prussian monarchy  was History’s end-goal, a discovery which renders
Francis Fukuyama’s recent meditations quite unnecessary.

JOSÉ MARTÍ:
NATIONALIST

Some of this
may explain why José Martí  on our side of the water –
could still be, at once, a liberal, a Romantic, and a nationalist in the late
19th century. Martí was born in Cuba to peninsular
(Spanish) parents in 1853. He early committed himself to republican and liberal
ideals. Already in 1870, he was exiled to Spain for his support of the 1868
rebellion, which became the Ten Years War. There, Martí acquired a
law degree and acquainted himself with the liberal and radical politics of
the Spanish Left. He read and traveled widely, living in Mexico and the United
States among other places, and developed a unique viewpoint based on his experiences,
observations, and reading.

Martí
developed a body of thought centering on liberalism, republicanism, and a
broad notion of social reform, all of which entered into his nationalism.
In this, Martí bears some resemblance to Thomas Paine, another widely
read propagandist with a straight-forward style. Cuban nationalists – Castroite
and anti-Castroite  draw on Martí’s
work and claim his legacy. Martí was a prophet and his religion was
liberal-republican Cuban nationalism. Asked at his famous trial, following
the failed attack on an army barracks near Havana in July 1953, who was responsible
for the raid, Fidel Castro answered, "José Martí."

As a Romantic
and eclectic thinker, Martí never built an elaborate system of thought
like that of, say, Karl Marx. He wanted Cuban independence from Spain, "social
justice," a republic, and a broad class of small landowners – that hardy
perennial of republican theory. Beyond that, he hoped for a resurgent Latin
American civilization based on cooperation between the Spanish-speaking nations
of the New World. To achieve these goals, Cubans needed to drive Spanish power
from their island, while somehow avoiding the clutches of the rising American
empire. A true "Pan-American," Martí found much to admire
in the North Americans – Emerson was one of his heroes – but he didn’t see
them as divinely appointed to run the western hemisphere, much less the world.

CRITIC OF THE
NORTEAMERICANOS

I leave it to
the reader’s imagination why Cubans like Martí might have wished for
an end to the plunder-seeking, favoritism, and mercantilism associated with
Spanish rule. What is more interesting, for our purposes, are Martí’s finely etched
comments on the United States and its (formerly "their") people.
For example: "Between the shanties of Dakota and the virile and barbaric
nation in process of growth there, and the cities of the East – sprawling,
privileged, well-bred, sensual, and unjust  lies an entire world. From
the stone houses and the majestic freedom north of Schenectady, to the dismal
resort on stilts south of St. Petersburg, lies another entire world. The clean
and concerned people of the North are worlds apart from the choleric, poverty-stricken,
broken, bitter, lackluster, loafing Southern shopkeepers sitting on their
cracker barrels."1

I would merely
add that the loafing shopkeepers were probably engaged in story-telling, a
Celtic art-form well developed in the South, of which Martí was perhaps
unaware.

Writing in the
New York Evening Post in 1889, Martí described Cubans’ view
of the United States: "They admire this nation, the greatest ever of
those which liberty has raised up; but they distrust those elements which,
like worms in the blood, have begun in this marvelous republic their work
of destruction." Cubans could not "honestly believe that the excessive
individualism, the worship of riches, and the prolonged celebration of
a terrible victory are preparing the United States to be the model nation
of liberty…. We love the country of Lincoln just as much as we fear the country
of Cutting."2

But surely
it was Lincoln’s terrible victory as much as individualism and riches, which
made possible the country of Cutting. As historian Clyde Wilson observes,
"Historians who are well aware of the corruption that followed the war,
for instance, seem to imply that it mysteriously appeared after Lincoln’s
death and somehow miss the obvious conclusion that it was implicit in the
goals of the Lincoln war party."3 But Martí
, like many Romantic liberal nationalists, admired Lincoln, and rather than
stage a running debate with the founder of Cuban nationalism, I move on.

Martí
had a strong sense of the "plunder-seeking"4
alliance of business and government which characterized late 19th-century
America, an era still held by mainstream historians to illustrate the evils
of "laissez faire." Martí described the Gilded Age:
"These new tartars sack and pillage in the modern manner, riding in locomotives….
These birds of prey form syndicates, offer dividends, buy eloquence and influence,
encircle Congress with invisible snares, hold legislation fast by the reins
as if it were a newly broken horse, and, colossal robbers all, hoard and divide
their gains in secret…. Senators visit them by back doors, cabinet members
visit them in the quiet hours after the working day is over; millions of dollars
pass through their hands….5

This actually
sounds a lot like our present ruling alliance of state and business
– whether we call it corporatism, corporate syndicalism, or neo-mercantilism.
The interested parties in politics and business have perfected the system
in the meantime and the millions are now billions. Finally, the politicians
were actively creating crony-capitalism, as Walter Karp always pointed
out, and were not merely pawns open to corruption.

Other aspects
of American life gave Martí pause: "They [the Americans] believe
in need, in the barbarous right as the only right: ‘this will be ours because
we need it.’ They believe in the invincible superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon
race over the Latin.’"6 He also criticized
the norteamericanos’ racial attitudes towards blacks and Indians, but
since whole brigades of critical theorists remind us daily of these matters,
I doubt that my adding to the discussion is really necessary.

Martí
saw the United States as a "nation of different interests, hybrid composition,
and frightful problems, a nation resolved, before putting its own house in
order, to engage in an arrogant and perhaps childish rivalry with the world."7
Here, Martí was perhaps more right than he knew, for it was precisely
the desire of those who favored the "large policy" of overseas economic
empire to externalize perceived problems overseas instead of putting
their own house in order. As "Marse" Henry Watterson, editor of
the Louisville Courier-Journal, put it with characteristic bluntness and bombast:
"We escape the menace and peril of socialism and agrarianism, as England
has escaped them, by a policy of colonialism and conquest…. We risk Caesarism,
certainly, but Caesarism is preferable to anarchism."8

Why "expansionists"
like Watterson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Brooks Adams believed overseas imperialism
to be the only alternative to socialism, anarchism, and the like is less than
clear. Self-interest may enter into it, as well as the drive to exercise power
and seek glory. William Appleman Williams and Walter Karp both have something
to say to us, here. Making the case that there were, and are, alternatives
besides socialism and empire is precisely the point of antiwar.com.

EN LAS ENTRAÑAS
DEL MONSTRUO

As for José
Martí  that eloquent if unsystematic critic of the emerging American
empire: he was already dead when Watterson issued his manifesto. Martí
was killed in May 1895, fighting in the first phase of a war for Cuban independence,
a war he had helped organize and whose most eloquent spokesman he was. It
was probably just as well. He would have hated to see the arrogant norteamericanos
resolve the Spanish-Cuban War on their own terms, shoving aside the Cuban
leadership and using their war with Spain as the jumping-off point to Pacific
empire. Marti had launched the war in 1895 precisely because he feared US
intervention. The rebels, with a broad base among Cuba's black population,
were close to victory in 1898. The US intervened to keep the radicals from
winning.

He knew the
dangers. He wrote to a friend shortly before his death that it was his duty
"as far as I understand it and have the courage to realize it – to prevent
for a time, with the independence of Cuba, the United States from extending
itself through the Antilles and falling, with this greater force, upon our
lands of America. Whatever I have done up to today, and shall do, is for this….
I have lived in the Monster and I know its insides:  my sling is that
of David."9 We who live in the limbs of
the beast, if not exactly its entrails – those would be between Virginia and
Maryland, wouldn’t they?  can sympathize. After all, our lands were
conquered even earlier.

‘NO PEACE,
NO WAR’

Martí
predicted that a lengthy war in Cuba would create a pretext for US intervention.
Cuba would become an American colony. "Once the United States is in Cuba,"
he asked, "who will drive it out?"10
We have the answer to that question and it wasn’t pretty. Later Cuban revolutionaries
wedded to very bad theory managed to transform an American protectorate into
a Soviet protectorate. There are those who say that "after Castro falls"
we can "normalize" relations with Cuba. Actually, we could do it
ten minutes from now. Sanctions against Iraq punish and brutalize the Iraqi
people in a vain attempt to bring down a despised leader. The same thing applies
to Cuba. We might as well open up trade before the Canadians and Europeans
get all the best deals. Yes, I know that socialist "management"
accounts for much of Cuba’s decline into a stone-age economy. But this is
part of the larger case against socialism and is by the way. Why add to the
Cubans’ misery with sanctions which even Mr. Lincoln might have hesitated
to impose on the Confederacy?

And what about
"defense"? I should think that with all his spending in this area,
Uncle should be able to repel any actual Cuban invasions rather easily. If
we can’t defend ourselves from Cuba, a lot of money must have gone down some
domestic and foreign "rat-holes."

RESEARCH NOTE

It
would be very interesting to compare Martí’s
views on America with those of another keen foreign observer, Alexis de Tocqueville.
No less than Newt told you to read Tocqueville. This would be an interesting
project for some keen young historian as we enter the Second American Century.

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